Emergence and the Limit: A Workshop in Philosophy of Statistical and Thermal Physics

Emergence and the Limit: A Workshop in Philosophy of Statistical and Thermal Physics

On 25 November, this workshop will consider the philosophical underpinnings of a range of emergent and limiting behaviour in statistical physics, with an eye to assessing the “indispensability” of such limits.

Recent philosophical work has stressed the importance of various kinds of limits for a range of fundamental issues in physics. In this workshop we will consider the significance such limits, especially the thermodynamic limit and the continuum limit, across a variety of case studies. Our goal is to assess the role that such limits play in physics, as well as to assess the importance of limit relations to questions of emergence and other foundational problems.